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    The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm: The Reader as Metaphor
    Unavailable
    The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm: The Reader as Metaphor
    Unavailable
    The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm: The Reader as Metaphor
    Ebook148 pages2 hours

    The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm: The Reader as Metaphor

    By Alberto Manguel

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    As far as one can tell, human beings are the only species for which the world seems made up of stories, Alberto Manguel writes. We read the book of the world in many guises: we may be travelers, advancing through its pages like pilgrims heading toward enlightenment. We may be recluses, withdrawing through our reading into our own ivory towers. Or we may devour our books like burrowing worms, not to benefit from the wisdom they contain but merely to stuff ourselves with countless words.

    With consummate grace and extraordinary breadth, the best-selling author of A History of Reading and The Library at Night considers the chain of metaphors that have described readers and their relationships to the text-that-is-the-world over a span of four millennia. In figures as familiar and diverse as the book-addled Don Quixote and the pilgrim Dante who carries us through the depths of hell up to the brilliance of heaven, as well as Prince Hamlet paralyzed by his learning, and Emma Bovary who mistakes what she has read for the life she might one day lead, Manguel charts the ways in which literary characters and their interpretations reflect both shifting attitudes toward readers and reading, and certain recurrent notions on the role of the intellectual: "We are reading creatures. We ingest words, we are made of words. . . . It is through words that we identify our reality and by means of words that we ourselves are identified."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Pennsylvania Press
    Release dateMay 28, 2013
    ISBN9780812209105
    Unavailable
    The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm: The Reader as Metaphor
    Author

    Alberto Manguel

    Internationally acclaimed as an anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist, and editor, Alberto Manguel is the bestselling author of several award-winning books, including A Dictionary of Imaginary Places, with Gianni Guadalupi, and A History of Reading. Manguel grew up in Israel, where his father was the Argentinian ambassador. In the mid-1980s, Manguel moved to Toronto where he lived for twenty years. Manguel's novel, News from a Foreign Country Came, won the McKitterick Prize in 1992. In 2000, Manguel moved to the Poitou-Charentes region of France, where he and his partner purchased and renovated a medieval farmhouse. Célébrité internationale à plus d’un titre — il est anthologiste, traducteur, essayiste, romancier et éditeur — Alberto Manguel est l’auteur du Dictionnaire des lieux imaginaires, en collaboration avec Gianni Guadalupi, et d’une Histoire de la lecture, entre autres succès de librairie. Manguel a grandi en Israël où son père était ambassadeur de l’Argentine. Au milieu des années 1980, Manguel s’installe à Toronto où il vivra pendant vingt ans. Il reçoit le McKitterick Prize en 1992 pour son roman News from a Foreign Country Came. Depuis 2000, Manguel habite la région française de Poitou-Charentes, dans une maison de ferme du Moyen-Âge qu’il a achetée et remise à neuf avec son compagnon.

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    Reviews for The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm

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    • 4/5
      Not Manguel's strongest offering, but pleasant nonetheless. Full of nuggets, including this early warrant for the man-cave: "Wretched the man (to my taste) who has nowhere in his house where he can be by himself, pay court to himself in private and hide away" (Montaigne).
    • 4/5
      This slim book, The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm: The Reader as Metaphor is based on Manguel's 2011 A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania. In the introduction, Manguel notes that he had, in a previous book, briefly explored some metaphors associated with reading, but "felt that the subject merited a more in-depth exploration" (4). He focuses here on three: the reader as traveler, the reader in an ivory tower, and the reader as bookworm. Given the limits of a fairly short lecture, it's surprising how much Manguel packs in: a brief history of the use of the metaphor, a short case study, and then some of his own musings about the metaphor's present and future uses. Manguel also briefly comments on how electronic reading and the internet have changed the dynamic, at least for some readers. He writes "E.M. Forster's too-famous advice 'only connect' has taken the shape of a mindless interconnectedness, the feeling that by means of the World Wide Web we are never alone, never required to account for ourselves, never obliged to reveal our true identity. We travel in herds, we chat in groups, we acquire friends on Facebook, we dread an empty room and the sight of a single shadow on our wall. We feel uncomfortable reading alone; we want our reading too to be 'interconnected,' sharing comments onscreen, being directed by best-seller lists that tell us what others are reading, and by reader's guides added by the publisher to the original text, suggesting questions to ask and answers to give" (45-46). Manguel's comments on electronic reading (particularly on 47-48) mirror my own experience: I find that I don't pay as much attention, I read more quickly, and I don't retain what I've read nearly as well as if I hold the book in my hands. Will that change, over time? Perhaps.I've long enjoyed Manguel's writing, and this was no exception. This is a book to enjoy on a nice winter day, when you can take the time to savor the writing.